Paule Vézelay

In 1926, the British artist Marjorie Watson-Williams moved to Paris, where she adopted the name Paule Vézelay. By the early 1930s, she had become an active member of the Parisian avant-garde.

In France, Vézelay lived for some years with the Surrealist artist André Masson, and mixed with many of the most significant artists of pre-war Paris including Kandinsky, Mondrian, Miro, Magnelli, and her close friends, Jean Arp and his wife Sophie Tauber-Arp.

In 1934, Vézelay was invited to join the group Abstraction-Création and exhibited in several significant pioneering exhibitions of non-figurative art in France, Italy and Holland. Abstraction-Création was an association of artists formed in Paris in 1931 to advocate abstract art and promote formal purity and non-objectivity, including Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, Marlow Moss, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paule Vézelay.

Le Groupe Espace was an association of geometric abstract artists and architects founded in Paris in October 1951, with a manifesto issued in 1953. The artists of Le Groupe Espace were concerned with space in art and were influenced by the pre-war movements of Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism. Vézelay exhibited with them, and became president of a British branch of Le Groupe Espace.

Vézelay lived in France until forced by the war to return to England in 1939.

Vézelay’s work is represented in museums and public collections in Britain and abroad including Tate; the British Museum; the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, Oxford; the Kunst Museum, Basel; Modern Art Museum, Paris.